Communicative Reading: Modification of Foreign Language Teaching for Sustainable Development of Education

Abstract

The paper discusses a variant of transformation of language education in Russian universities. To make graduates more competitive on the labour market, it is necessary to follow the principles of competence-based approach and to develop communicative competence, which is the basic in the program of foreign language for non-linguistic students. Communication may become the foundation for the development of all language skills such as reading, writing and listening. Communicative reading is defined as an approach to teaching reading in class with the help of the basic reading strategies: predicting, visualization, making connections, summarization, questioning, inferring, vocabulary expansion and contextualization. A set of exercises has been developed and tested in groups of non-linguistic students. Approbation proved them to be motivational and productive in terms of foreign language communicative competence development. This original approach to teaching reading corresponds to the ideas of education for sustainable development.